Tag: Alexa

Amazon’s Alexa assistant can now be used to control Roku TVs and Roku streaming devices: Roku launched an official Alexa skill for its streamers Tuesday, making it possible to control video playback and more with the help of Amazon’s Echo s…

Amazon has gone back to the long-form, star-studded well for the Super Bowl, incorporating Harrison Ford, Forest Whitaker and Broad City duo Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson into a 90-second spot promoting Alexa.
The spot, which was released today online…

Amazon Alexa is coming to compatible Razer devices via Razer Synapse 3 in the second quarter of the year, Razer announced Tuesday from CES. The company also announced that its Razer Chroma Connected Devices Program is officially live with 15 new partne…

Nvidia has teamed up with Amazon to add Alexa voice support to its Shield Android TV streamer. Shield TV owners can now control the streamer with the help of an Amazon Echo, or any other smart speaker with Alexa built-in. Some of the functionality enab…

The October 2018 Xbox Update is bringing a slew of new content, including the debut of the new Xbox Avatars, Voice Skills, and Dolby Vision video streaming. The hotly-anticipated new Xbox Avatars are coming to the system with a wide range of different …

Facebook took its first major step into hardware on Monday, unveiling Portal and Portal Plus, two video-calling devices aimed to make it easier to chat or watch shows with friends.
Powered by an artificial intelligence software, Portal’s camera t…

Turns out Amazon wasn’t done with its fall device announcements: Two weeks after introducing a number of new Echo speakers and accessories as well as a new DVR, the company announced a new 4K Fire TV stick as well as a new Alexa voice remote Wedn…

Amazon is looking to move upmarket by making its own Alexa-powered Hifi equipment, according to a new CNBC report. The e-commerce giant will introduce at least 8 new devices before the end of the year, including an amplifier, a receiver and a subwoofer…

With Amazon’s newest device, you can now yell at your TV from across the room — and it will listen and respond to you. The e-commerce giant officially has taken the wraps off the Fire TV Cube. Priced at $119.99, the cube essentially melds a…

Tivo now allows consumers to control their DVRs with voice commands via Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant: The company is adding Alexa support with a software update to select Tivo models, giving consumers the ability to change channels, launch apps…

Activision’s bid to use artificial intelligence, machine learning and Amazon’s smart speakers to make people better video game players only supports “Call of Duty: WWII” right now, but the pilot program will be expanding. “Right now, this i…

Alexa could get a bit more opinionated about media in the future, Amazon Fire TV VP Marc Whitten told Variety. Speaking at the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Whitten said he was toying with the idea of turning Alexa into a 2018 version of a Blockbuster store clerk, who can guide your […]

In advance of next week’s annual tech-palooza CES, Roku announced plans to roll out new voice functionality, enabling the company to keep pace with Amazon and Google as the tech industry and TV stakeholders place big bets on voice recognition.
The Roku Entertainment Assistant, along with expanded home entertainment licensing under the banner of Roku Connect, will hit the market this fall. Investors sent Roku shares, already riding high since last September’s IPO, up…

Amazon reported healthy revenue numbers for the third quarter, up 34% to $43.7 billion from the year-earlier period, and CEO Jeff Bezos said Alexa voice services hold the key to continued growth.
The revenue results exceeded Wall Street projections of $41.6 billion and shares started to rise in after-market trading.
The company also said NFLThursday Night Football games on Amazon Prime Video have drawn a total of 7.1 million views in the first four games – a respectable…

It’s obviously silly to think that wearing glasses will make you smarter, but only because the truth is that all smart people wear glasses. Now, though, Amazon is developing a pair of “smart glasses” that will actually do something interesting beyond making your vision clearer and giving bullies a convenient target. …

We had mixed feelings about last night’s debut of South Park’s 21st season, which, in classic South Park-ian fashion, braided together a few resonant strands of American culture toward an ambiguous but still condemnatory conclusion. (They also didn’t mention Trump while, weirdly, writing about Trumpist white…

Apple has Siri, Google has its Assistant, and Amazon has Alexa, but Facebook isn’t looking to join this illustrious group with its own voice assistant any time soon. “We are not working on that actively right now,” said David Marcus, the company’s VP of messaging products, in an interview with Variety at Facebook’s F8 developer conference this… Read more »

Last week in our first post on video search, we talked about the value of owning the customer search process. We also talked about the coming fight to dominate video search.

Search is not new. Fights to dominate search are not new either; we search for any number of things every day. Behind the scenes are companies fighting minute to minute to host our next search.

The most common search mechanism is, of course, text-based search, and Google is the main game in town, owning 55 percent of global search advertising revenues. Voice-based search is still emerging and for now is a much more competitive space. Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), Cortana (Microsoft) and Google Now are all making a play to win in this space.

However, look at video search. No one controls video search. And not only does no one control it, but there is virtually no one even doing next-gen video search today.

Let us explain what we mean by “no one.” Let’s say you’re using your Xfinity (or similar) service today. Everyone knows how to search the Xfinity platform for content. Your search will yield linear channel results as well as on-demand results. But pay TV subscriptions today account for roughly 75 percent of video consumption (and that share is shrinking steadily). That’s because the libraries on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon are enormous and offer a ton of value. Add in the dozens of options in the “digiverse” for all kinds of other content and it’s no mystery why people need a next-gen search tool to cover all the bases.

But it turns out that video search is pretty complicated. Current search engines struggle with even the basics of real-world consumer needs. But go a level deeper and the challenge becomes really hard.

For example, say you want to find a movie that features something in particular, like a car-chase or a treasure hunt. Finding such a movie is a challenge. Type “car chase” into your video service search bar and you’re likely to get results all over the place. We’ve done this ourselves, and we have found things like “Car Chasers” (a TV show about buying cars) instead of useful hits like “The French Connection,” “Bullet,” “Vanishing Point” and other classic car chase movies. We even got a link to a video on Chase Utley, the second baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Or imagine you have a kid who’s frightened by violent animals. Being the caring parent you are, you take pains to avoid violent animals on the screen. But few if any services let you filter out violent animals.

Some startups, like the Video Genome Project are making video search easier, but they’re not here yet. Nevertheless, the big TV conglomerates should beware.

Next week, we’ll address the potential value of the video search product.